“Hello,” she said.
The sound of Gibbs’s voice moved me like the refrain of an old song. I knew it wasn’t right that it happened that way. But it did.
“It’s Sam. Hey, how you doing?”
“Did Alan Gregory tell you to call?”
What was that about?“Nah. Just wanted to be sure you’re safe. We haven’t talked. Where are you?”
“Vail. A motel.”
“Is it pretty?”
“Low clouds. It’s okay.”
“Here, too. Low clouds. Gray.”
“I hear the South is like that sometimes.”
She sounded cryptic. Maybe she was aggravated to be alone on the holiday in a motel. I could relate to that.
“I’m not in Georgia anymore. I drove north. I’m up in Indiana.”
“You are? Why on earth would you go to Indiana? Where?”
“Currently, South Bend.”
“Really? Do you have family there? Is that it?”
“No, my family’s up in Minnesota for the holiday. I’m following up a long shot. A tip we got. Probably a waste of time. You’re okay? You haven’t heard from Sterling? Seen him anywhere?”
“I guess I’m okay. I feel terrible that my problems have kept you away from your loved ones on Thanksgiving. You shouldn’t have to do that. I wish you’d just go get on a plane and go be with your family. I’ll pay. That would make me feel better. Will you do that? Just go to the airport right this minute?”
“No Sterling?”
“No.”
“Well, I’m fine, Gibbs. Don’t concern yourself with me. You try to make the best of your holiday, but stay vigilant, okay? You’ll do that? Keep an eye out for Sterling. Give me a call if anything makes you nervous?”
“I promise. Good-bye, Sam.”
I closed the phone. “He’s not there.”
Carmen said, “Thanks for trying.”
I’d stiffened up. Let’s say pulling myself from behind the wheel to get out of the car wasn’t one of the most graceful things I’d ever done.
Holly’s house had a three-foot chain-link fence around the backyard. Since the house was on a corner, it was possible to get a real good look around the entire property by strolling the sidewalk. With ten kids inside I could hear noise and laughter from the house half a block away. I turned around at that point and retraced my steps toward the house.
On my first pass around the corner nothing had seemed amiss. On the way back, though, the latch on the backyard gate had been moved to a different position. The gate hook was one of those horseshoe latches that raise up to allow the gate to swing open and then slide back down to horizontal to lock everything into place. I was sure it was down during my first pass.
It was up during the second.
I crossed the street and phoned Carmen.
“It’s me. The latch on the back gate. You know the one?”
“The chain link?”
“That’s the one.”
“Yeah, I know it.”
“Was it up or down when you last came by?”
“Couldn’t tell you. Why?”
“It’s up now. I thought I remembered it being down.”
“There’s a houseful of kids in there, Sam. One of them must have run outside for something.”
“I guess. Can you see it from where you are?”
She hesitated. “No, I don’t have a good view of the gate from here.”
“I’ll get back to you.”
I crossed back across the street, waiting in the dark shadows of a big tree I thought might be an oak, and I watched the rear of the house. Laughter, chatter, kitchen activity. An occasional child’s yell. Just what you’d expect.
Nothing more, nothing less.
It took me a few minutes of watching to recognize that something was missing.
Holly.
Holly was missing. Her two sisters were making frequent appearances at the sink that was under the kitchen window. But Holly hadn’t made a single appearance since my first pass around the corner.
Not one.
I felt a sharp tug just below my rib cage and reflexively reached into my pocket to find the little brown bottle of nitro.
As I rolled it back and forth between my fingers, I continued to stare at the kitchen window. It had been dark for a while. Now it wasn’t.
I saw one blond sister. Then the other blond sister.
No Holly.
I listened to the cacophony of voices.
No Holly.
That wasn’t right.
I checked my watch. Four minutes after seven. I figured it was just about time to carve the turkey. I was guessing the brother-in-law who wasn’t Artie would be doing the honors.
I strolled closer to the house and leaned against the corner of the detached garage that was about ten yards away across the little backyard.Come on, Holly. Come on. Show your face.
Talk to me.
I called Carmen again. “Holly go out the front door for any reason in the last few minutes?”
“No. What’s up?”
“Maybe nothing. I’ve lost track of her.”
“Sam, she’s inside with her family.”
“Yeah, I know that.”
I flicked my reading glasses down, hung up, and searched for another number in my cell phone’s memory. Found it.
Holly’s number.
Four rings. Finally, a kid answered.
“May I speak to Holly, please?”
“Hold on,” the child said. He or she threw the phone onto something hard. The resulting explosion in my ear was painful.
Come on, Holly. Come on.
A minute, a dozen different voices. A loud call of “Aunt Holly?” Another. Then, “Anybody seen Aunt Holly?”
Holly’s voice anywhere in the mix? I didn’t think so.
The child came back on the line, finally. “I can’t find her. Can you call back, please?”
“Sure.”
Just then someone shoved a dull knife up under my rib cage. Rotated it side to side. Did it again. Deep.
That’s what it felt like, anyway. The pain took my breath away, literally. I did an inventory.
Pain in my neck or jaw? No.
Down my arm? No.
Sweaty? Yes, a little. Okay, quite a bit.
I unscrewed the top of the little brown bottle, popped a nitro under my tongue, and braced myself for the inevitable flush.
Here we go,I was thinking.Here we go.
SIXTY-ONE
ALAN
Tayisha was finished in five minutes.
She joined me where I was waiting for her in Diane’s office.
“Don’t be looking like your hemorrhoids are acting up,” she said. “I won’t charge you the whole thing. Tell you what, we’ll make it… we’ll make it two-fifty. How’s that?”
For five minutes?I should have been grateful. Tayisha had cut her original price in half. It still seemed like a lot of money for five minutes of anything.
I started unpeeling bills. “I only have twenties. You know, the cash machine.”
“We’ll make it two-sixty, then. That’ll work.”
I finished counting to thirteen and held out a thick stack of bills. She snapped them from my hand, folded them once, and stuffed the wad into the back pocket of her jeans.
“The thing is going to work? You’re sure?” Any enterprise that required me to turn over a large quantity of cash in total secrecy tended to leave me feeling a little bit anxious.
“I tested it; it’s all good.” She eyed me the way people eye a friend after he insists he can drive just fine after a night out drinking. “You know what you’re doing, right? You’re not planning something stupid?”
I shrugged.
“Figures. I’ll be back next week to sweep the rest of your building. Just save the equipment for me. Don’t rough it up; it’s fine stuff.”
“Sure,” I said. “Thanks. I appreciate your doing this on Thanksgiving.”
She patted
the back pocket on her jeans. “That’s a car payment. It’s a pleasure doing business with you.”
Diane’s office, like mine, has a solitary French door leading out to the backyard. That’s the way Tayisha left the building.
Five minutes later it was also the way that Adrienne arrived.
Adrienne was my neighbor, she was Sam’s urologist, and she was, most important, my friend. I’d chosen her to assist me that night for two reasons. One, she was a conspirator by character. Her life as a respectable, and respected, physician was a cover for her true calling as an anarchist. Second, she was on call for Thanksgiving anyway and had spent a good chunk of the day at Community Hospital, which was only ten or so blocks away. Since I’d already fed her son, I knew I wouldn’t be pulling her away from a holiday dinner with him.
She was dressed as though she’d awakened in Boulder that morning and discovered the whole town had been moved to the Arctic. Scarf, hat, gloves. A down parka that made her look like the Michelin Man’s little sister.
“This sort of thing doesn’t happen to normal people, you know.”
That was Adrienne’s version of hello.
“I never claimed to be normal people.”
“A bug? Somebody planted a bug in your office?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Do you know who?”
“I do. A lawyer.”
She perked right up. “A lawyer? We’re trapping a lawyer? Hell, I’ll get naked with you for that.”
“That won’t be necessary, Adrienne.” She would have. I had no doubt. I was more curious about the associative stream that led her to make the offer than I was about the prospect of seeing herau naturel.
She sat down on Diane’s sofa and said, “What do you want me to do? If I get a page from the hospital, though, I’m out of here. Just so you know. Today I’m the catheter queen. Who knew? If the nurses can’t thread the needle, they call me. Sometimes I don’t do a single emergency Foley in six months of call. Today I’ve inserted three Foleys in five hours. Must be a turkey thing. Whatever it is, one more and I’m calling Guinness.”
I didn’t want to hear about any dubious urological records. Foley catheters made me squirm.
“You’re going to play a doctor,” I said.
“It’s a bit of a stretch, but I can do that. What kind of doctor am I?”
“A shitty doctor who just screwed up a procedure.”
“Hardly,” she said. “Who’s my patient?”
“You’ll see.”
Her face lit up. She’d started playing along with me in earnest. That was when I knew I had her cooperation. “Am I a urologist? Precisely what did this mystery patient come to me to have examined?”
“You’re a Denver urologist, but you live here in Boulder.”
“Which means I’m a Denver urologist with taste.”
“You screwed up a vasectomy. You cut a nerve or something, made a guy impotent.”
She shook her head at my ignorance. “Sorry, hon, but that’s not exactly how the anatomy works. To make a guy impotent during a vasectomy, I’d have to use a tomahawk instead of a scalpel.” She proceeded to explain the complex physiology of erections and the precise surgical maneuvers involved in completing a vasectomy in much more detail than I ever wanted to know. Erotic it wasn’t.
“Once we get started in there, could you simplify it a bit, Adrienne? This is for a lay audience.”
“Don’t worry, even though your way is pure science fiction, I’ll play along. But you’d better hope there are no doctors in the front row of the theater.”
We rehearsed for a few minutes. I checked my watch. It was fifteen minutes after four o’clock.
I’d told Jim Zebid that I would be handling an emergency prior to our Thanksgiving evening appointment. If he was planning to eavesdrop on the emergency session, he’d be in place outside already. I imagined him sitting in a darkened car on Walnut Street with his receiving unit finely tuned and a pair of good headphones over his ears.
“You feel ready?” I asked Adrienne.
“Just show me the stage.”
“This way, madame. Break a leg.”
Adrienne whispered, “You know this would never happen in real life? Me screwing up a procedure like this?”
“I know. Goes without saying.”
SIXTY-TWO
SAM
The rules of nitroglycerin are simple. If one tiny tab under your tongue doesn’t make your chest pain go away in a few minutes, you throw another little white pebble into your mouth. The instructions don’t tell you to pray, but if you’re still caressing that minuscule brown bottle after those first few minutes of center-of-your-world, center-of-your-chest agony, then it’s likely you’ve already made contact with whatever version of God that you consider might be the most influential.
I was sitting, leaning up against Holly’s garage, when I popped the second nitro. As a general rule, standing and nitroglycerin go together about like beer and chocolate. Not too well. That’s why I was sitting.
I started thinking about Simon. That freaked me out.
As a way of distracting myself while I waited for the second nitro to kick in and the pain under my ribs to ease, I refocused on Holly’s house. Artie was at the kitchen sink. I didn’t take him for a roll-up-his-sleeves, get-his-hands-dirty kind of guy.
But no Holly. Still no Holly.
My head was pounding. After the flush and the disorientation, the next side effect of nitro is the headache. An ice-cream brain freeze and a big bass drum. It’s that kind of thing, and it comes on instantly.
Artie walked away from the window. One of Holly’s sisters took his place at the sink.
Holly?
I phoned Carmen.
“Any sign of her yet?”
“Sam, where the hell are you?”
“Behind the house.”
“You don’t sound too good.”
“A little indigestion.”
“How can you have indigestion? You haven’t eaten anything.”
“It was probably that energy bar thing you gave me. My body’s not accustomed to healthy crap like that. Any sign of Holly?”
I heard a car door open, then slam shut. I turned my head and spied the Cherokee, but I could only see the front end from where I was sitting.
“No,” she said. “Nobody’s gone in or out of that house.” Her tone announced that she was pissed off.
I could hear her walking. First the sounds came through the earpiece of the phone, then gradually I could hear her footfalls through my other ear, the one that was uncovered. The steps grew louder, more determined. Finally, Carmen emerged above me. God, she was tall.
“I’m calling an ambulance,” she said.
“No, no. It’s getting better. I swear. The nitro’s working. It is.”
Was it? I couldn’t tell. The pain wasn’t gone. But I could almost breathe without gasping. That had to be a good sign.
I didn’t want to get into another ambulance. Not on Thanksgiving. Not in South Bend.
She squatted beside me, adopting a posture that I knew I couldn’t have managed after a year of dieting and daily yoga sessions.
She touched my face. “You’re clammy.”
“No, I’m Sammy.”
She slapped me. A true little love pat.
“If you die out here after you talk me out of calling an ambulance, I swear I’ll come to your funeral and piss on your grave.”
“I’d love to see the surveillance tape on that.”
She slapped me again.
The pain was easing. It was. The knife was out from below my ribs.
“I’m good,” I said. “Just a little angina. Doc said I might have some angina every once in a while. That’s what the nitro’s for.” The doc hadn’t said that, but it sounded like something a doc might say.
She stared at me as though she didn’t believe a word out of my mouth.
“I have a feeling Holly’s not alone,” I said.
“Don�
��t change the subject.”
“I’m serious. I think he might be in there. Sterling.”
“Why?” Her solitary word was a simple question, but given its inflection, it was also a statement. The statement was“Don’t be an asshole. Not with me.”
Not now.
I explained about watching the kitchen window and about my phone call to the house.
“Okay, how would he have gotten in?” she asked. Her inflection? I recognized it. It was the one I used to employ with Simon when he was younger and he blamed mishaps around the house on his imaginary friend, Tank.
“Maybe he went in when everybody arrived, you know? He snuck in the back door when the family was at the front. Isn’t that possible?”
“Anything’s possible.”
Carmen was staring at me, not at the house. She thought my sneaking-in-the-back-door scenario was about as likely as Gibbs going to Wal-Mart to buy her winter wardrobe.
“Or Holly might have let him in,” I added.
“What?” she said. The tenor had changed. It was more like: Now you’re saying something interesting. Tell me.
“She likes danger-risk might be a better word. We know that, right? Sexually speaking, Holly Malone likes risk. That was the whole thing with Sterling in the first place.”
Carmen nodded. She completed my thought as though we’d been partnering for years, not hours. “And doing it with an accused murderer while her family is gathering for Thanksgiving…”
I visualized Artie’s disapproving eyes. “Yeah, that sounds risky enough. That would qualify.”
“How long since you’ve seen her?”
“Ten, twelve minutes.”
We were both staring at the house. My eyes were plastered on the window wells that led to the basement. That’s where I figured they’d be, Holly and Sterling. In some room down there. For some reason I decided that it was the laundry room. An image of Holly propped up on the dryer began to develop in my consciousness until I shooed it away like some aggravating insect.
But like a yellowjacket in late summer, it came right back.
I was ready to move, to go inside the house, but I wanted Carmen to arrive at the same conclusion herself. While I waited for her to come around, I hit a speed-dial number on my phone. Lucy. “Hey, Luce. I just have a second. The feds ever find Brian Miles?… No?… Thanks… Yeah, fine. Seriously. I’ll call you in a bit.” I hung up. “Miles is still missing.”
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